


Afterimage

by kehlee



Category: The Fault in Our Stars - John Green
Genre: M/M, Unrequited, did they kiss? or nah
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-16
Updated: 2014-06-16
Packaged: 2018-02-04 21:50:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1794382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kehlee/pseuds/kehlee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>afterimage (n.): 1. an impression of a vivid sensation (especially a visual image) retained after the stimulus has ceased 2. isaac's life after gus waters, sight, and other objects of varying importance</p>
            </blockquote>





	Afterimage

**Author's Note:**

> the world's largest inequality as of late is the lack of isaac/gus fanfiction. i have attempted (in the slightest) to remedy this.

There is an empty slot. This empty slot resides in three places currently: a photo album, a heart, and the place that Gus Waters took up before he was fired from his job as a person. Not that he did his job poorly; Gus was one of the most phenomenal of all people that Isaac had the luxury of knowing. It just so happened that his death was an unfair lay-off from the grim reaper. This was, however, the first of many lies Isaac had begun to feed himself shortly after this unfair lay-off of his friend from personhood, and as he grieved less than beautifully, he found himself lying deeper and deeper to himself.

His suffering was not the worst, some would say. He was supposed to suffer nowhere near as deeply as Gus's girlfriend, Hazel Lancaster. He was supposed to grieve not as hopelessly as Gus's parents, who, in the midsts of their sorrows, had seemed to forget the meanings of the posters that plastered their walls. (Without pain, how could we know joy? If your eyes are too clouded, how can you even see the sun?) His eyes, by the way, were far too clouded to know of joy. His sight was no longer a going concern. Isaac's thumbs and forefingers were poor substitutes for most of the sight jobs lately, coupled with what he could hope to understand from the edgy, harsh sounds of life around him. Braille, it turns out, sucks. Acute hearing is not actually a real thing, or perhaps it has not yet revealed it’s incredible self. 

Gus's parents asked on many occasions for prayers, but prayers were most needed to strengthen the self it seemed. Gus's parents seemed to cling to Isaac, Hazel, and many of Gus's pre-cancer friends, as if they could taste the drops of poison left on his friends’s still warm lips, hoping hopelessly to drink in their long-gone son. Gus's parents, if they knew any better, would learn to back off, because all of his friends were slowly imploding.

At the very least, Isaac knew he was. It had first been at the three in the morning call that his ribs shattered into his chest and pierced holes in his already wavering heart, and once again at his funeral. Giving up, letting go, all the words that he had heard people ramble off without understanding the pain wholly, were not an option he had given himself permission to accept. The one thing that he'd managed to give up, to let go of successfully was a photograph, depicting two teenaged boys side by side, heads pressed together and camera set to front-facing so they could take the picture. One boy's hair was meticulously messy, the other's combed just right. One made use of two healthy eyes, the other simply one. One had one and a half legs and a strange limp, the other two. It seemed a pattern. Their faces shoved together, lense focused on their opposites, one of each's arms thrown around the other's shoulder, the other of their arms extending the camera phone far past their faces to snap the photo.

Being as unsentimental as Isaac was, he found himself able to set it beside Hazel's pack of cigarettes, hear the creaking casket holding his no longer breathing friend lower into the wormy earth, collect the crumbling sand of his ribcage and shove it back inside of him. Loss was no longer anything new to him, though each loss seemed horribly worse than the one before. A girlfriend, fine. Sight, not so fine. A best friend, absolutely not fine. Three losses in a row had weakened him and one night-morning with even the draping sky wishing for star sleep, he found himself longing for his sight. His whole sight. He wished to see the photograph one last time, to be able to see the slope of Gus's jawline, to see the morning light shine in and carry in something on hope’s feathery back.

No such luck. This photograph of sorts was one that had a tendency to invoke memories, and he believed that if he could see it once more he would finally comprehend the absolute robbery of Gus Waters from the world. Perhaps, however, he simply wished to reminisce. Not a shameful wish. The night that the photo was taken was one worth reminiscing, he knew. It began with the cool whisper of Indiana summer air snaking over Isaac's skin and Gus's hand gripping his shoulder as the previous walked humbly into his own room. There were no words spoken, glances stolen, just a silent understanding. Isaac followed him out of his own room without another word, careful not to alarm his parents. Gus's teeth grit as he inched down stairs and Isaac's cat looked up at him, ready to tattle at any moment. Isaac followed close behind, toes popping and making sure the other was okay frequently (he was, actually, shocked that Gus could sneak out of a house with a squeaky prosthetic) and, finally, they were out the door.

Not long after did Gus wordlessly coax him into his car, play an upbeat song, drive somewhere he had never been before. They came upon a swing set that seemed to be accompanied by nothingness but not loneliness. The swing set in quite fully expressed itself, and the fact that nothing surrounded it did not make it of lesser value. It fulfilled its role without being overbearing. Each boy took a seat upon a swing, the metal bars above them creaking ever-so-slightly. Nothing at all had to be said.

It went something like this for quite some time until Gus received a phone call. He had stepped to the side to speak with whomever it so happened to be, brown hair illuminated by rings of white moonlight. This view was not angelic, not anything quite so special, just another happening, but Isaac now wished he had soaked it in some more. The fleeting memory was just that: fleeting. 

The tone of his friend's voice denoted he was speaking to parents, and Isaac was aware this meant the night would be short-lived. However, Gus hung up, sat back beside Isaac, and at last spoke to him.

The details of what was said were far from important. They laughed, so hard that they cried in fact. They smiled, and they shared tinily intimate moments between them. Moon rays seeping through the perfectly achieved “mess” of brown hair. Bright stars reflecting onto thick-framed glasses. Shoes scuffing against each other. Lips, as they were. It was the Most Important Day, containing thousands upon thousands of tiny and meaningless intimacies. Really, they meant nothing.

The photo was taken as a sloppy and induced major importance, so, of course, it was nowhere near as perfect as the perfectionist (and that would be Gus) could ever hope that it would be. That seemed to be Gus Water's hamartia: he never came to terms with the fact that things planned perfectly will always be far from it. The photo took much fumbling around, awkward hand extensions, laughter, a cracked phone screen. This lead to more laughter, which was very expected. Each boy soaked in the other in each moment, as if some inkling of their soul knew they would not see the other like this again.

Two days later, Isaac found out he was going to lose his sight. A double-fortnight later, Gus found out that his whole existence waxed cancer. Three woeful days of knowing this was spent with his best friend across the world with his beautiful girlfriend, and Isaac left at home attempting to learn Braille, which was rather difficult without being able to actually see.

Braille was still far from a strong suit. Isaac could feel and Isaac could process, but these things often happened separately. He did a poor job of processing feeling, which turned the lack of sight situation into something much more impossible. Had Gus been around, he would have reminded him, mocking a poster on his parent's walls, that The Word Itself Says I'm Possible! But Isaac would have kneed him in the guts for saying something so stupid and not understanding just how goddamned difficult it is to lose everything that you knew mattered.

Another Gus Waters evening had brought about Isaac saying that love is keeping the promise anyway. He had, at the time, been referring to long-time-but-no-longer girlfriend Monica, and now he realized that this was very much applicable to Gus Waters himself. Of course, there had been no promise between the two, there was nothing to keep, but he still felt it. Oh, god, he still felt it.

Those were the empty slots in his life. He swallowed to keep the pain down, as it had a tendency to want to come up as literal and extremely physical vomit. He spent mornings trying to convince throw-up back down and he spent evenings doing the same. This pattern was one day interrupted by a semi-unexpected visit. Hazel Lancaster, Gus's girlfriend. (He wondered, temporarily, if your boyfriend dies, do you become their ex? Or are you still their partner? This was not something he could ask Hazel, though.)

Hazel Lancaster's perpetually clean hair was greasy and her puffy cheeks seemed somewhat less puffy than usual (not drinking well, he was later told). Something felt amiss the whole time they spoke, taking a walk around the block. Taking a walk was no longer a fifteen minute activity; an hour of time had to be dedicated to walking around the block for Now Blind Isaac. Hazel did her best to crack jokes, to smile, but the looming stab of the large and time consuming knife hovered millimeters above their skin. Hazel should not have walked around the block at all. They had to stop and sit down eight times, but she absolutely insisted that they talk outside.

She did not mention his name at all. When she alluded to him, her lips curled downwards and her eyelashes cast shadows under her eyelids. Poppies bloomed in her soul. Isaac did not speak of him at all. He told her that braille was extremely difficult because he did not handle his sense of feeling well, but how else could he read pornos and find out how to get crack and stuff? She laughed but weakly. They reached home after an hour and a half of light chat, and Isaac's feet slammed against the cement of his driveway at last. The fluttery unpleasant feeling of chitchat no longer floated above them. Hazel Lancaster’s words cut through Isaac like a vaguely rusty knife. Her voice was gentle and full. His non-seeing, non-existing eyes would have gotten a bit wet.

When he curled up in bed that evening, he felt phantom lips hanging upon his own. Had he ever felt the air's kiss, or had it been imagined? Did Gus Waters perhaps love Isaac deeply just as he had Hazel? It was absolutely woeful to live with a dead love. It was surreally impossible to live with a dead and unrequited love. Isaac's heart no more than ached.


End file.
